Thursday, 27 April 2017

3 Companies that never believed Google would amount to anything.

It is no longer a news that Google is the world's leading search engine. It came into the market on its knees and begging top brands to help it grow but was rejected because they never thought anything good could ever come out of search engines, not to talk of Google.

Here are 3 Top tech companies that never saw anything good in Google.

1. Yahoo
If there will be an award for the tech companies with a long history of regrets, Yahoo should definitely top the list.

In 1998, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin had approached Yahoo, with an opportunity to buy its PageRank system for as little as $1 million. The duo wanted to focus on their studies at Stanford, but Yahoo showed no interest as it wanted users to spend more time on its own platform.However, as time progressed the online world soon began to realize the importance of third-party online advertising revenue. Google built its own pay-per click service called AdWords back then, and is now the key reason for Google’s rags to riches story. In 2002, Brin and Page went to Yahoo once again, this time to raise funds worth $3 billion. However, then Yahoo Chief Terry Semel refused the offer as it looked to again build its own search engine to compete with Google. Yahoo acquired search engine Inktomi and ad revenue maker Overture in its mission to build the search engine that would topple Google.However, Yahoo failed miserably in execution, and fell to its own demise.

Google aka Alphabet is now one of the world’s most valuable companies, with its worth nearing $500 billion. In comparison, the latest deal reveals that Yahoo’s core business was worth just $4.83 billion.

2. Excite

Back in 1999, Excite was the No. 2 search engine and Google was the new kid on the block. Larry Page offered to sell Google to Excite for $750,000 (though with the stipulation that Excite would replace their technology with Google Search tech).

There are several possible explanations for why Excite made this choice, but the end result is clear. Excite was eventually bought by Ask.com, which has a less than 2 percent share of the search market. Google has more than 60 percent of the U.S. search market share and much larger share worldwide. And Google has more than $130 billion in assets, so it's worth more than 173,333 times what Excite would have paid for it.

3. Microsoft

Microsoft introduced MSN Search in 1998, the same year that Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. Google was fast, innovative, and good at delivering relevant results. MSN Search was none-of-the-above.

Microsoft hadn’t even bothered to develop a search engine of their own. They used results from Inktomi, an existing search engine. Search simply wasn’t a priority. Microsoft was more focused on defeating Netscape Navigator in a battle of the browsers.

By 2002, it was painfully obvious to Gates that search had been a big missed opportunity. Google had earned $348 million in revenue that year. A year later, in 2003, Google almost tripled its revenue to $962 million. Finally, Microsoft started developing a search engine.

The company launched Windows Live Search in 2006 but it failed to compete with Google. In 2009, Microsoft rebranded once again and introduced Bing. Billed as the first “decision engine”, Bing has taken a small bite out of the search market, but it hasn’t been cheap. In the fiscal year ending June 2011, Bing cost Microsoft $2.5 billion more than it earned.